Lightning grounded Thursday’s scheduled launch of a Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9. A lightning strike in the vicinity of the Kennedy Space Center within a half hour of the scheduled launch violated launch rules, triggering a scrub. The launch is rescheduled for 5:07 p.m. Eastern Saturday, with a 60 percent chance of acceptable weather. A launch Saturday would allow the Dragon to arrive at the station Monday morning, a day after the departure of a Cygnus spacecraft. [SpaceNews]

Virgin Galactic conducted another test flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane Thursday. The vehicle made its fifth glide flight, and the first in a month, in the skies above the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. This flight tested the handling characteristics of the vehicle with a tank of water simulating a fuel tank. The company said it would now go into “a period of ground-based activity” to prepare for fueled, and then powered, test flights in the coming months. [SpaceNews]

Scientists announced Thursday they have discovered another gravitational wave from a black hole collision. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected the gravitational wave in January, and scientists said they had confirmed that the signal was a real event, likely from the merger from two black holes with masses 19 and 31 times that of the sun. The detection is the third gravitational wave found by LIGO in a little more than a year, suggesting that the black hole mergers that create them may be relatively common in the universe. [Space.com]

China has a busy month in spaceflight scheduled for June. China plans to launch its first astrophysics observatory, the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, in mid-June, followed by the launch of the Shijian-18 experimental communications satellite on the second Long March 5 near the end of the month. The Tianzhou-1 spacecraft, launched in April, will perform another docking and refueling test with the Tiangong-2 module during the month. China will also host the Global Space Exploration Conference in Beijing next week. [gbtimes]

Iran is ending efforts to launch humans into space. An Iranian news agency reported this week that the country’s space agency had canceled the program, citing costs of $15-20 billion over 15 years. Iran launched a monkey on a suborbital flight in 2013, which at the time was seen as a first step for a human spaceflight program that could see its first mission in five to eight years. Iran’s space program has attracted Western scrutiny as a cover for missile development activities. [New York Times]